China Research Centre - People

Dr. Guo is specialised in East Asian media and cultural studies and has published extensively on Chinese television. He wrote a Ph.D. on Chinese historical TV drama and popular cultural flows in East Asia (University of Westminster, 2012). He is currently working on a research project, to investigate the delegation from China Central Television which visited the BBC around 1978: the end of the Cultural Revolution period. Members of this delegation have since become highly influential in the development of TV drama in China, and especially historical dramas. The term ‘quality television’, which derives from this visit, still has currency in China. The research would involve work at the BBC Written Archives as well as interviews with personnel from CCTV and the BBC.

Shzr Ee currently researches musical activities on new media platforms in overseas Chinese communities. Her interests on this arena range from viral videos to politico-musical activism on the internet. Other research areas include music and gender, music and politics, urban ethnomusicology, indigeneity and connections between music and food cultures. Shzr Ee’s monograph, Beyond ‘Innocence’: Amis Aboriginal Song as an Ecosystem was published in 2012, and more recently co-edited and contributed to Gender in Chinese Music. Other publications have appeared in Ethnomusicology Forum, Journal of American Folklore and edited volumes with Oxford University Press, Palgrave Macmillan and Routledge. Shzr Ee is also an active musician with a background in classical piano, Korean percussion, tango/ Balkan accordion, Chinese and Okinawan lutes (sanxian and sanshin) and the Chinese fiddle (erhu). She has appeared at the South Bank, the British Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the National Maritime Museum and the Truman Brewery, among other performing venues.

Dr. Thorpe explores Beijing Opera (Jingju) as it is practiced in China and amongst the British Chinese diaspora. He is also interested in representations of China in British theatre. His monograph The Role of the Clown (Chou) in Traditional Chinese Drama was published in 2007, and subsequent articles have appeared in Contemporary Theatre Review, Asian Theatre Journal, Theatre Research International, and Studies in Theatre & Performance. He is currently working on a monograph mapping the history of Chinese drama in Britain across the twentieth century, as well as an edited collection exploring contemporary British Chinese culture.

Historian of modern China, focusing on the late Qing to the Republican period (broadly 1800-1949), an era of dramatic change in China as it was reluctantly forced to open up to foreign trade, ideas and technology. Principal interests are in Chinese modernisation and its engagement in globalisation from the 19th century onwards, in particular the role of the foreign-run Chinese Maritime Customs Service, as well as the creation of the Chinese Postal Service, and Chinese newspapers in the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries. Her works include Reading Shenbao: Nationalism, Consumerism, and Individuality in China 1919-37(2009), Print, Profit and Perception: Ideas, Information and Knowledge in Chinese Societies, 1895-1949 (co-ed., 2014), 'Breaking the ice: the establishment of overland winter postal routes in the late Qing China,' (Journal of Modern Asian Studies, 47:06, 2013).